The Lived Experiences of Pediatric Oncology Parents Through the Use of Online Communication Pages (2012)
Undergraduate: Danielle Fried
Faculty Advisor: Diane Yorke
Department: Nursing
The purpose of this study is to better understand how parents of pediatric oncology patients use online communication pages to record, express, and share their experiences. Examining these experiences from the parents’ own perspectives provides insight into how we as healthcare providers can better support parents of children with cancer. Many studies have reported parents’ experiences during their child’s initial diagnosis with cancer, but few studies exist that explore parents’ experiences throughout their child’s first cycle of chemotherapy as the parents themselves write about it. Three subjects were purposefully selected for different cancer diagnosis, child age, and sex. The online communication pages www.carepages.com and www.caringbridge.com were used to obtain the parents’ stories examined in this paper. Any writings the parents shared that were reflective, emotional/affective, or described the care they received were recorded. These selected writings were examined for consistent themes and analyzed for possible implications for practice. The consistent themes identified were the following: graciousness, remembrance/keepsakes, faith, sadness/feeling overwhelmed, hope/comfort, variable moods/mixed feelings, self-consciousness, self-education, comradery, anger, strength, taking things one day at a time, disorientation, denial, fear, pride, advocacy, siblings/spouses, and normalcy. These themes were expressed in discussion of both positive and negative experiences with